Belief You Can Change In
Three Sundays ago, my friend Helen’s son got married in the waterfront grove of the old family farm on the coast of Maine. I first saw the place at her sister’s wedding 35 years earlier-- to the week, when its overgrown mosquito infested acreage was reachable only by scrambling down a series of ledges and its almost 300-year-old Cape Cod house had neither water nor electricity. Now I saw the miracles of sheer determination. Hacking away for thirty years-- a weekend here a weekend there, had produced not just electricity and running water with a hot tub on the restored screened porch, but a paved road down to the rebuilt barn and a dirt parking lot where there had been an especially thick tangle of poison ivy. There were wide, painstakingly bark lined paths to the waterfront, and so much foliage clipped away, so many trees harvested by a professional forester, the breeze could pass through the old apple orchard and blow mosquitoes out to sea. Not one bite on anybody that afternoon made me tell Helen she and her husband deserved a noble prize.
Actually prize worthy displays were everywhere. As perhaps a reminder of the family’s seafaring heritage, the bride-- in a strapless with a seriously long train, arrived in a white lobster boat. Standing coveside, surrounded by white plastic buckets sprouting deeply red and yellow hued wild and summer flowers, this young working class woman was married to Helen’s Ivy educated son by a local justice of the peace. In Maine this need only be a notary public. Nobody in the family adheres to organized or otherwise religion, and they don’t seem to need it. The four “children” in the front row, all carefully dressed for the occasion, and armed with their own digital or iPhone camera to remember it, were evidence they’ve managed to embody the wisdom anyway. The lithe beauty with long, shiny black hair and high heels was Vietnamese. The impossibly tall young man and wide young woman with dark chocolate skin were Sudanese. The fellow with the contagious smile, lanky legs and caramel colored skin had been rescued at birth from the underbelly of Boston. They were all members of the family.
This astonishing tableau captured the spirit of the late Helen Sr., a passionate New Englander who bought the abandoned farm in the 50s to bring her family “home.” An executive long before working women became a norm, she was an enthusiastically devoted mother who stabilized her daughters by giving them deep roots, then egged them on to whatever they thought they could do, whatever they dreamed to dare. Not striving for improvement and achievement, not knowing how or what to do to make things better were not acceptable. She was pushy that way.
The low-key gala also reflected the blithe spirit of Helen’s Newfoundland father, a wisp of a man tough enough to be an intrepid reporter who survived the bombings of London and the machinations of the Boston Globe. “If I’d known,” he once told me with a twinkle in his eyes, “that my daughter would grow up to become the senior vice president of Merrill Lynch, I assure you I never would’ve had sex.” That daughter’s interracial marriage and her sister’s interracial adopted son were perfectly okay though.
The remarkable parents are sadly past tense but their two remarkable daughters are still happily in multi-decade marriages to their first and only husband. Both are mothers who have never relied on a nanny to raise their kids. Helen’s two are now Ivy League graduates with good jobs and advanced degrees. Her sister’s daughter, who is still in high school, is currently training to be an Olympic equestrian, part of the reason the sister recently switched from this farm to a horse farm to which her husband now has to commute from his high ranking research at the Sorbonne.
Helen hacked out a career path the way she hacked airspace and paths through the overgrown woodland. She was the first person to take a PhD to the Street instead of academia and became the first woman to take the express elevator to the top of it. Her younger sister Susan, who I was sitting next to, started out to be a dancer and ended up with a Masters in Molecular Biology as well as a law degree. She worked for a financial services agency and learned enough tricks of the trade to set up her own financial services business and sell it for a mint. The sisters have become extremely rich by their personal efforts, but you wouldn’t know or even guess their bank balances from the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the brands they buy, or the deliberate down-home feeling of the wedding whose guests included the backhoe guy who’s always lived down the road.
No matter what heights they reach, Helen Jr. and Susan have stayed as stubbornly focused on rooting and rooting for family as their mother was. They have dedicated their considerable resources not to getting their names emblazoned on buildings, headlines or even musical program notes, but to personally raising abandoned children. When Susan discovered refugees too toxic for the system to digest, she convinced Helen they should take them in. The four dark Sudanese children had escaped Africa only with their lives, not knowing if their parents had been macheted or bludgeoned to death behind them as they ran. They were distrustful and unwilling to be separated, for all they had in the world was each other. To quell their fear of diaspora, Helen took two of the teen-aged girls—her house was big enough. Her sister took the oldest girl and the brother John because she already had an adopted interracial son close to his age. That oldest girl, Yar, is now married to a Sudanese and about to have a baby, which is why she hadn't come.
I watched the young people sitting pretty in that manicured grove, tapping like any American teenagers on their Iphones or comparing photos on their digital cameras and loudly teasing their brother the groom, wondering how I could ever describe the knack Helen and her sister Susan have for making the nearly impossible seem so easy. How magical it is that Susan who is pale and frail and weighs at most 110 lbs introduces the seven-foot high, black skinned John as “my son” in the same matter of fact, no big deal tone she introduces Patrick as “my husband.” In truth it has not been easy to drive those kids to counseling and to school and to private tutors, to make them warmly welcome in a cold climate and clothes not native to them, to fill out endless documents and applications, and integrate them so seamlessly with their own flesh and blood. Yet they have hacked away at all this too. The oldest one in Helen's house graduated from a private school and Brandeis University and got American citizenship before she got accepted to the London School of Economics, went back to Sudan to try to find some family and promptly disappeared in a cross cultural meltdown. The youngest needed even more counseling to feel she could fit in and eventually came home with a new best friend, the Vietnamese girl who Helen promptly took in because she saw it would steady them both.
The other good news besides the marriage was that the oldest had surfaced, apologized and was now safely at the London School of Economics. She is the first Sudanese woman ever to be educated and will doubtless hack through the thicket of intolerance and violence to restore her country to the family of peaceful nations. I told Helen as it happened, I’d just met a woman working for USAID in Africa who couldn’t find educated females to carry out its mission of feeding women and children. Perhaps we should introduce her to Adeui. About a week later Helen called to say we hadn’t talked enough at the wedding so we should get together to catch up and maybe make the connection for Adeui. We set up a time but as it approached she phoned from the car. “I have to cancel,” she said. “The younger one (she actually said the name but I don't recall it clearly) and I are off for back to school shopping. Right now the most important thing is to get underwear for my daughter.”
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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posted by Sandy Garson @ 6:00 PM
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